[As
usual, I’ll end
the year—even this most frustrating of years—by AmericanStudying a handful
of major stories. This time featuring a special Friday Guest Post from one of
the wonderful student papers in my Senior Seminar on 21st Century
America! Please add your year in review responses, thoughts, and airing of
grievances in comments.]
On two contexts
for one of the year’s true feel-good stories.
Since my first
three year in review posts had focused on pretty weighty topics, I wanted for
this fourth and final post of mine (before tomorrow’s Guest Post) to engage
with a more pleasurable story: the Chicago Cubs
breaking their 108 year streak and winning the 2016 World Series. I’m not
suggesting that sports aren’t significant—hopefully the many posts and series
linked under this
blog’s Sports category make clear how much I see sports as a vital part of
our culture and society, past and present. Neither would I argue that sports
simply offer escapism, a way to forget about the kinds of topics on which my
first three posts have focused—not only because we can’t and shouldn’t forget
those contemporary topics, but also because sports themselves often feature,
and indeed help us better engage with, precisely such
cultural and social issues. But at the same time, part of being an AmericanStudier—part
of being an academic at all—is not allowing our analytical lenses to obscure
the pleasures we can take from the worlds around us; and there’s nothing like
being a father to two sports-obsessed sons to remind me of just how pleasurable
(and, yes, painful) the world of sports can be.
My sons are more
into football and soccer than baseball, but the broader spectrum of baseball
fans, and questions of what the sport means to them, nonetheless offers one
interesting and important lens through which to analyze the Cubs victory. On a
personal level, I have a number of friends who are Cubs fans, none more so than
Lito Velasco; Lito’s one of
those 21st century friends whom I met through a friend on Facebook
and haven’t had the chance to meet in person, but he’s a friend nevertheless,
and watching the ups and downs of the 2016 postseason through
his eyes became one of the more charged and moving experiences of my year.
On a public level, I was just as moved watching legendary comedian and actor Bill Murray
process and respond to the Cubs’ Game 7 and Series victory—it’s easy (and
likely inevitable) to feel far removed from such uber-famous figures, but Murray’s emotional moments
remind us of how much such experiences and emotions are shared across any and
all distinctions or boundaries. If the goal of life is to find, experience, and
keep emotional connections to the people and world around us, both the most
inspiring and the most challenging varieties, then there are few if any
elements that provide those connections more consistently and potently than
sports (artistic and cultural works, of course, being another).
Speaking of
artistic and cultural works, a predicted Cubs World Series victory plays a role
in a number
of pop culture texts. The most famous is likely Back to the Future Part II, which predicted a 2015 Cubs
victory at the same time as, as many have noted, the social and political ascendance of the very Donald
Trump-like Biff. But the TV show Parks
and Rec nailed its prediction even more exactly, setting one of its culminating 2015 season’s flash-forwards
in a spring of 2017 where “obviously everyone [in Chicago is] in a great mood
right now because of the Cubs winning the Series.” These pop culture references
were often used for either shock value about future changes (as in Marty McFly’s
disbelief) or humor about the victory’s unlikeliness in reality (as in this moment
from The Simpsons). But I believe
the Parks and Rec moment works in a
different way, one that certainly riffs off of that unlikeliness but that
focuses instead on what a Cubs victory would mean for the community that
experiences it (a choice that makes sense in a show that was
all about communal identities, politics, and relationships). In each and
every case, these references reflect what sports means in our culture, how
culture engages with those meanings, and how a Chicago Cubs World Series
victory could and did resonate across multiple layers of our 2016 landscape.
Special Guest
Post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other 2016 stories you’d highlight?
PPS. Lito Velasco reminds me, rightly, of how much his wife Jennifer was a part of the Cubs' run and our collective experience of it as well. Lito and Jennifer work together as the great Mad Lovers Cosplay, which you can support here:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.patreon.com/MadLoversCosplay